The Baddest A$$ External Hard Drive Enclosure

I’m not a fan of the PPA Metal Gear Box USB 2.0 Hard Drive enclosure. I purchased one, lost thousands of songs due to corrupted data, and now have been hard drive enclosure less for over a week. I sent it back to PPA with hopes of fixing the problem which they seemed far too familiar with when I explained what happened me and a friend of mine who also got screwed by a Metal Gear Box. Why have I been subjected to such torment? Because Netgear hadn’t released this product until now.

The Netgear Storage Central that I saw at the Connections Conference took my breath away. Two IDE drives fit nicely into this white and silver box-o-goodness. Costing only $129.00 for this double shot, I can add my two 250GB Western Digital 7200RPM 8MB buffer hard drives and store half a terabyte over my network. This fatboy plugs into your router and shows up as a network drive. Mirroring, partitioning, and striping are available for each individual need. Expect to see this network storage device in a month. Updates to this will include ‘server qualities’ for example streaming the content to you T.V. while your computer is off.

Makes me feel like a heel for paying $60.00 for a single drive PPA Metal Gear Box USB 2.0 external hard drive enclosure that loses power due to poor chip architecture and corrupts my unmirrored data! (I’ve just started showing my bitterness about this situation, don’t catch me on a bad day!)

The Linksys product (as you can see) has two USB connections to your drives, rather than stuffing them inside the box proper. You can argue for/against this design – but conceptually, it’s the same idea.

It looks nice at first glance, but you forgot to mention the proprietary software that needs to be installed on every friggin’ client before they can see the SC101. I was totally ready to buy one and then I found out about that little ‘detail’ on another site.

Heres a question, with all the talk about mirroring your work, music, files, whatever it is that “we” do…. once the NEW technology hits mid summer I am NOT gonna dump 2 large on a new setup right now because the new technology will be making its debut… back to the fact… with said new technology, and whats sure to be a 74 or 150KB Raptor Drive… are we gonna be able to daisy chain these NAS enclosures to pile on the black hole of space that is video, and audio? I.E. 500GB sounds like a LOT… until you start saving 12 Megapixel Photos, TV SHOWS, TONS OF SONGS, etc… sounding like you wanna start at a TB and go from there doesn’t it….. so long winded question in one simple sentence. DAISY CHAIN or NO. THANKS!

My big concern would be Are these units NTSF compatable & Can they be configured to work with an already loaded hard drive?
as most I see are only FAT 32 & want to do a fresh format on an empty drive.

As I currently have 2 120G maxtor drives formated to NTFS with no OS that I am using as network drives, I am looking for a solution that will allow me to simply pop in these drives & configure for network use to plug into my router.

I need a external hard drive I would like to be under a $100 I had purchased a WD passport but it wont work on one of my computers that had ME and now has xp with fat32 can you tell me what hard drive that I can move from computer to computer for a fat32 operating system Thanks

I’ve been in IT for near 30 years and this is thing is a nightmare. Stability issues, inability to connect, no compatibility with Linux, Mac or Unix. It only takes PIO 6 drives (which you have to dig through the fine print to find out) and absolute sloppy utilities interface. I have no idea what the engineers were smoking when they designed this thing but they definitely created a monster. I can not believe Netgear continues its slide into super junk consumer products with this garbage.

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About

Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.